Decision Threshold

Enterprise information portals now add real business value by supporting access to decision-processing systems, and support for e-business apps is on the way

By Colin White

Business executives and mangers are now overwhelmed by the vast amount of information generated by their organizations, and the increasing popularity of corporate intranets and extranets exacerbates this situation. To react rapidly to changes in the business climate, users need to easily find their way through this mass of corporate information and quickly locate the information they require to make informed business decisions. Fortunately, a promising solution has recently emerged: the enterprise information portal (EIP).

EIPs offer you an effective way to give business users a simple and personalized Web interface to information that is scattered across networked enterprise systems. Many different information portals are now on the market, and each is suited to a particular type of user and to carrying out specific tasks. These products build on the valuable experience we've gained using Internet portals to provide personal users and consumers with easy access to information stored on public Web servers.

In this article, I'll explore the benefits of enterprise information portals for effective decision making, and explain how these tools are evolving to support the use of e-business applications and the distribution of corporate business information to key trading partners and clients.

EIP Benefits

An EIP has three key benefits for business users. First, all EIPs employ a Web browser interface that is simple to use and cost-effective to implement. Second, all EIP users, including external users such as trading partners and customers, share the same common view of business information, which promotes a common understanding of business operations. Third, an EIP provides an integrated and customizable interface to all the information a user needs to do his or her job.

The EIP interface is integrated in that it provides a single point of entry to any piece of business information, regardless of where it resides. An EIP provides access to information in the complete information supply chain as data flows from transaction-processing systems into decision-processing systems. There, users can analyze that information and distribute the results in the form of collaborative objects such as email and office documents. (See Figure 1, page 37.) An EIP can also help users organize and manage objects that create business information, such as decision-processing queries, reports, and analyses. Business managers can use the EIP to find these decision-processing objects, run them, and retrieve the results. Some EIPs also let decision-processing objects run automatically on a schedule- or event-driven basis, and deliver the results to executives and managers via email or the corporate intranet.

FIGURE 1 Information flow in an enterprise information portal.

Information viewed through an EIP interface is customized (personalized, that is) to match the role of the user in the organization. This feature saves users' time and provides security; they see only the information that interests them or that they are authorized to access. For example, executives can be notified quickly about information that requires urgent action, while business analysts can drill down through multiple levels of information when engaged in detailed tasks such as financial analysis or supply chain optimization. This process results in better business decisions, which in turn lead to reduced costs and improved revenues.

EIP Evolution

As mentioned earlier, many different types of information portals are available, especially in the EIP marketplace. (See Figures 2 and 3.) The most basic form, the intranet portal, provides general company information and includes links to important information and Web sites both within and outside the organization. This type of portal is analogous to sites such as Yahoo on the public Internet. Evolved from the intranet portal is the collaborative portal, which adds personalization capabilities and the ability to track and share workgroup information such as office documents and email. Again, this functionality is similar to that offered by a My Yahoo page. Although several independent collaborative portals are on the market, in the future, vendors will probably integrate this style of portal into workgroup systems such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.

An information portal begins to add real business value to an organization when it supports access to information managed by decision-processing systems such as a data warehouse. These decision-processing portals examples include VIT's SeeChain Portal and Plumtree Software's Corporate Portal give business users access to corporate business information tailored to their role in the organization. They provide ready access to the information the business user needs to make informed business decisions for day-to-day business operations and strategic planning. This process may involve giving executives high-level key performance indicators about business operations, or helping business analysts and line-of-business managers navigate their way through a decision-processing system from highly summarized information down to very detailed data.

FIGURE 2 Enterprise information portal evolution.



FIGURE 3 Information supported by enterprise information portals.



FIGURE 4 Closed-loop decision making.

Many decision-processing portals are packaged with business intelligence tools that work cooperatively with the portal to help users access data warehouse information, and create, manage, find, and run decision-processing objects such as queries, reports, and analyses. The results of running the decision-processing objects are also managed and accessed via the portal. These decision-processing portals offer more than simply a Web browser front end to a business intelligence tool (and associated underlying data marts and data warehouses). Several products also allow business information from collaborative and office systems to be integrated into, and accessed by, the portal.

A marketing analyst, for example, could use such a portal to access and manage all the information required to mount a new marketing campaign, including customer information and profitability analyses, marketing collateral, external marketing data, promotion and campaign analyses, channel comparison analyses, customer segmentation and behavior analyses, and sales force analysis. As the campaign progresses, the analyst can integrate additional information and decisions documented in office documents, email, and so on into the portal. In the future, he or she can return to the portal and find all the information associated with the campaign, examine why particular decisions were made, and determine the impact they had on the marketing program.

EIPs on the Market Portal-Enabled Business Intelligence Tools MyEureka* (Sterling Software; formerly Information Advantage) ReportMart* (Brio Technology; formerly Sqribe Technologies) E-Portal Suite* (Viador) Portal-Enabled Analytic Applications SEAport (Lawson Software) Onyx Enterprise Portal (Onyx Software) mySAP Employee Workplace (SAP) SeeChain Supply Chain Performance Measurement Applications (VIT) Independent Decision-Processing Portals Plumtree Corporate Portal (Plumtree Software) SeeChain Portal (VIT) * also available as an independent portal

Support for Analytic Applications

The increasing use of analytic application packages is a key trend in the data warehousing and decision-processing industries. An analytic application is a turnkey packaged solution for decision processing; application examples include financial management, customer relationship management, and supply chain performance management. The main benefit of analytic applications is that they are based on best industry practices and let organizations deploy decision-processing solutions more rapidly than building the application in-house.

Many analytic application packages are likely to be deployed not only on corporate intranets, but also on extranets. You could use a supply chain performance management analytic application, for example, to optimize the complete supply chain as raw materials flow into the manufacturing process, and finished products are distributed to retailers and the consumer. Because the flow of information associated with this supply chain may involve inter-enterprise business information, an EIP can help users track and manage this external business information as well as internal business information.

Like business intelligence tools, analytic applications are also becoming portal-enabled. The business benefits are the same: Personalized access to business information as it flows from decision-processing applications into collaborative systems and back into transaction-processing systems to form a closed-loop decision making environment. (See Figure 4.)

Closed-Loop Decision Making

Business users employ business intelligence tools and analytic applications to analyze business operations on a daily basis as well as over a period of time. They use information from this analysis to make business decisions about how to more efficiently run the business. These decisions usually result in changes to back-office and front-office transaction-processing systems in areas such as product pricing, channel marketing, and sales quotas. Managers can then measure the positive or negative effect of these changes with decision-processing tools and applications.

At present, the closing of the loop between decision processing and transaction processing is a manual process, and often involves the exchange of information via collaborative processing in the form of emails, presentations, office documents, memos, and so on. The support for collaborative processing in a decision-processing portal is therefore essential for tracking and integrating information about the actions taken when closing the loop between decision processing and transaction processing. The ability to track the lineage of information and associated business decisions gives managers and executives the ability to retroactively discover why a particular decision was made and gauge its impact on the business. Consequently, many portal-enabled business intelligence tool and analytic application vendors are adding collaborative capabilities to their products.

The Move Toward E-Business Applications

Most decision-processing systems employ an underlying data warehouse to integrate data from various back-office and front-office transaction-processing operational systems for analysis by business intelligence tools and analytic applications. In this environment, an information portal provides the integration of both data warehouse and non-data warehouse information in support of a closed-loop decision-making system. Furthermore, a new type of operational application the e-business application is now rapidly appearing in many organizations, and it must integrate into the decision-processing environment as well.

E-business applications act as an additional data source for a data warehouse and can also be plugged into a closed-loop, decision-making system. The feedback to an e-business application from the decision-processing environment, however, may need to occur more rapidly (or maybe even in real-time) compared with a back- or front-office transaction-processing application, because the analytic results from the decision-processing environment may be used to control the interaction (the sequence of Web pages displayed, for example) between the e-business application and the user. In the future, organizations may use intelligent e-business portals to automate the feedback mechanism from the decision-processing environment to an e-business application based on business rules defined to the portal.

In the short term, decision-processing portals will evolve to handle e-business environments by supporting external users and external business information accessible via corporate extranets and the public Internet. Such portals will also let users switch seamlessly from a decision-processing system to the e-business environment. An example here would be an insurance company that provides analytic and other business information about insurance claims to its key customers. A business user at the customer's location could use the insurance company's portal to access and analyze this claim information, and then switch to an e-business application to make any adjustments to the customer's insurance coverage.

EIP Architecture and Requirements

The three main components of an EIP are the information assistant, the business information directory, and the subscription facility. (See sidebar, “The Important Eight,” for specific functionality you should look for in an EIP.) Product support for these components varies, but the most important factor to look out for are the capabilities provided by the business information directory.

• The EIP information assistant provides a Web browser interface that works in conjunction with a search engine to enter and process user requests for business information. This interface is customizable and can be personalized to match the information requirements of the user. Personalization occurs based on user and user group profiles defined to the business information directory by the administrator.

• The EIP business information directory is a Web server-based index of an organization's business information. This index is maintained via a Web-based publishing facility, by automated information scanners that regularly scan selected servers for new business information, and by an import interface that lets users and third-party vendors maintain directory information via flat files or a programmatic interface.

• The EIP subscription facility gives users the ability to have business information distributed to them on a regular basis. Information can be delivered (or information objects run) immediately, at a certain time and date, or at user-defined intervals. With some portals, business rules can be defined to the business information directory so that as information changes, the rules are evaluated, and if satisfied, a report is generated automatically and delivered to the user.

As information portals evolve to support the e-business environment, this rules capability will evolve into a business rules directory facility that will assist in automating the feedback from the decision-processing environment to transaction-processing and e-business applications. The subscription facility can then route messages to the appropriate transaction or e-business application based on the information received from the decision-processing system and the rules in the business rules directory. This directory is also an ideal place to store and customize the algorithms that analytic applications use to produce business metrics for managers and executives.

The Portal Opens

Enterprise information portals are powerful and cost-effective tools for giving business users a simple and integrated Web interface to the information they need to do their jobs. They also offer a managed approach to distributing corporate business information to external trading partners and key clients. In the future, e-business enterprise information portals will become a key feature of applications that integrate e-business applications into a closed-loop decision-making environment.

The Important Eight If youre investigating EIPs, these eight criteria should be on your checklist. 1. Customizable, Web-based, information assistant user interface to search, navigate, and access the business information viewed through the EIP. 2. Extensible and open business information directory to document and index the business information viewed through the EIP, and to store EIP control information and user profiles. 3. Customizable business rules directory to automate the feedback from the decision-processing environment to the transaction-processing and e-business environments. 4. Interactive administration capability to manage the user profiles in the business information directory that define and control the types of information users can access. 5. Interactive publishing facility to document business information and objects in the business information directory. 6. Information scanners that index the business contents of specified file and database systems and store the results in the business information directory. 7. Business information directory import and export capability that supports XML and other industry file formats. 8. Subscription facility that supports the schedule- and rule-driven running of decision-processing objects and the delivery of information to a destination of choice in a format of choice.

Colin White (cwhite@dbaint.com) is an analyst, consultant, and the founder of DataBase Associates International Inc., a leading information technology consulting company. He specializes in data warehousing, business intelligence tools and analytic applications, enterprise information portals, and database systems.

• Privacy
• Your California Privacy Rights
• Copyright © 2008 United Business Media LLC